ALL THE NEW THAT FITS

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THE “sleeker, smarter” Hartford Courant hit the stands yesterday (and probably stayed there all day). Having worked at the fatter, dumber Courant for 10 years, I suppose I should have checked it out, but even morbid curiosity couldn’t get me to do so.

Luckily, courant.com has a link right at the top of the front page so I could Learn More About The New Hartford Courant. Click and you’re treated to a three-minute promotional piece aired by sister channel Fox 61 (which, like the Courant, is owned by the Tribune Co.) about “The NEW Hartford Courant.” And wouldn’t you know it — they’re really excited about it!

Turns out the NEW Courant is “edgy”! (Too bad “edgy” hasn’t been edgy for about 10 years). I learned that the NEW Courant uses a new font that “really bolds up the design”! Well said!

The NEW Courant is “stacked with fresh new features.” And it will be “easier to read”! The paper’s storied history of “insightful writing and in-depth coverage” will continue! Well, I’m sold!

And so are the Fox 61 anchorbots, who seem particularly excited about the groundbreaking vertical “letterhead.” Best of all, the anchor dude tells us, the weekday papers will have “less pages so the readers can get their news quickly!” Yeah, all those pages of news were really standing in the way of my getting the news.

If you don’t feel like watching the Fox 61 video, you can simply read the accompanying error-filled transcription, which looks more like a copy editing test (if newspapers were still hiring copy editors.)

OK, OK, maybe I’ll check out the new Courant one of these days. I’ll just have to bold myself up first.

REALLY, NOW

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HERE are some up-to-the-minute bits of truth:

Even if the presidential debate is held tonight, most Americans won’t watch because they too have more pressing matters to attend to, like seeing “Eagle Eye,” going bowling or getting shitfaced.

The shocking part isn’t that yet another evangelist, Tony Alamo, is facing charges of sexual misconduct. It’s that the guy’s real name is Bernie Lazar Hoffman. Jesus Christ!

Nicole Kidman credited her unexpected “miracle pregnancy” to a dip in the Kununurra waters in Australia’s Outback. Not being married to Tom Cruise anymore probably helped increase her odds a bit too.

A new Pew study of U.S. workers found that half of the respondents check their work e-mail on weekends. Which is ironic, because they spend half their time at work watching pandas sneeze on YouTube.

David Blaine’s “Dive of Death” was a ratings bomb. Of course it was — who the hell wants to watch him survive?

The economic collapse of our country doesn’t sound so bad when you use cutesy words like WaMu, Fannie and Freddie. I can’t wait for next week’s takeovers of Fergie and the Great Gazoo.

CURE FOR THE COMMON CODE

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EVERY campaign, we hear the same buzzwords over and over again. And most Americans fall for them all, over and over again.

Barack Obama and John McCain and their respective posses are tossing out these buzzwords as fast as we can gobble them up. “Flip-flopper,” “elitist,” “establishment” — these words trigger gut reactions, but what do they even mean any more? Glad I asked…

Flip-Flopper

At some point in our history, changing your mind became a bad thing, a sign of weakness. But our president hasn’t changed his mind on anything in eight years and where has that gotten us?

I have great respect for someone who can admit he was wrong when presented with new information. If that’s flip-flopping, so be it. It’s the pandering that disgusts me — when a candidate cynically and conveniently changes his stance or “moves to the middle” based on opinion polls and the mood of the voters. And everyone’s doing that in this race.

Elitist

Um, you’re running for president of the United States. Is any job in the free world more elite? Don’t you want the smartest people around you if you get the gig?

Republicans crack me up when they try to paint Obama as an elitist, ’cause it ain’t easy for a black or biracial person to get into the elite in this country — that Obama did seems to indicate he’s got some balls and some smarts and that he won’t be denied. But that just might be the problem — when they call Obama an elitist, it seems to me like they’re really saying “he’s a smart black guy and we need to put him back in his place.”

Small-Town Values

Republican shorthand for “guns are a God-given right, and when an intruder breaks in and tries to rape your daughter, you can send him to Kingdom Come. But if your girl gets pregnant, she’ll have to have the baby.”

I grew up in a small town, and yeah, they’re nice and all, but you don’t see a lot of black people or Jews or foreigners or other such “undesirables,” and the people who live there can be pretty close-minded and sheltered, even if they can see Russia from their porch.

Turns out there are parts of this country where lots of people live. And guess what? They’re not so bad! Yet some Republicans wave the flag and profess their great love of country while spitting out the names of places like Massachusetts, Chicago and San Francisco as if they were Sodom and Gomorrah.

Our country is not simply a small town on a grand scale, and it can’t be governed like one. Anyway, can you really tout small-town values when you have enough houses to actually create your own small town?

Change

That’s about all the money we’ll have left if someone doesn’t fix things fast.

There’s no need to keep bringing “change” up, guys — we get it, things suck now and you’re gonna make everything better. Now if you would just tell us how …

Celebrity

The Republicans have painted Obama as an attention whore, lumping him in with Britney and Paris. Why, because he is hugely popular and draws big crowds and is good-looking and is “celebrated”? Sour grapes, anyone? I’ve seen McCain doing his shtick on “The Daily Show” about a dozen more times than Obama, and it was McCain’s wife’s $313,000 outfit that Vanity Vair dissected after the conventions. Sorry, but running for president puts you in the spotlight — to lash out if your opponent upstages you is childish.

Career Politician

Can we all just let this one go? By the time they get around to running for president, they’ve pretty much made a career out of politics. Would you rather we had a dentist in the White House, or an actor? Uh, never mind.

ENGINE TROUBLE

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Update

THE search engines took the bait last week and sent some people my way (see my previous post for details.) Searches for information about “mccain link to aig buyout” and “barack vs mccain on buyouts” led some unsuspecting people to my heaping pile of bullshit. Sorry about that.

Alarmingly, a lot of people who got to my blog apparently wanted to see Redskin foreskin, and were searching for things such as “chris cooley unedited nude pic.” Sorry to come up short here, folks.

In the meantime, there were more of those odd searches that make me laugh: “self pleasuring, how to,” “pleasuring animals,” “do eyes lie” and “i got bit in my front lawn it hurt?” I wonder if he got bit while pleasuring an animal…